SEO Hosting Blog

Regardless of how many or how few search engine optimization blogs you spend your time reading, one of the main topics that just about every SEO blog focuses on is building links. Although anyone with a basic understanding of SEO realizes that they need more links in order to rank higher in the search engines, there is a big difference between understanding this concept and actually understanding how to build links that have a significant impact on your rankings.

For today’s post, I want to take a look at how you can actually formulate a link building strategy that gets results for your website. While this is a topic that I will most likely address on multiple occasions, hopefully this introduction will get you pointed in the right direction.

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If you are trying to build links that point back to your blog or website one of the most powerful ways you can do that is by offering to write content on other blogs. This is a little different than landing a freelance writing job because your offer is to help bloggers by writing content on their blog for free. While this might not sound like a very good deal for you, it really is. 

Paying for links is risky. Google has a good sniffer for spotting paid or sponsored links. Doing link exchanges, especially blogroll exchanges is proving to not have much value. Ordering sponsored posts is very risky because you then put your site on Google’s radar. So really what option do you have left? 

The answer is in writing guest posts. It is a safe and very natural / organic way to score powerful backlinks to your blog or website. Consider this too. When you publish content on other blogs, you are in complete control of the link building process. You are in complete control of how you want to word your content and shape and mold your links pointing back to your site.  In other words, writing guest posts on other blogs gives you the ability to take a blank piece of digital paper and turn it into anything you want. 

Guest posting on other blogs has other benefits as well. For one, you’ll find that you have an endless supply of blogs where you can publish your content on. Most bloggers struggle for material. Just like a journalist or a columnist, often bloggers struggle from writers block and totally enjoy it when someone offers to provide them with killer content. 

Another benefit is the fact that not only can you build links by writing the content, you can also take advantage of the opportunity and use the post to sell yourself to readers of the blog you are publishing on. This gives you an amazing opportunity to increase the number of regular reader who read your own blog or website. 

The only disadvantage I can think of is the amount of time you need to invest into writing content. One thing about that though is I believe that you always get back when you put in. Meaning, if you invest the time into writing quality content on other blogs, your return will be great as well. 

Contact a few blog authors and you’ll be surprised to discover how many of them will contact you back having a strong interest in having you write a post for them. I know for a fact that when people contact me, I get excited because I know that my nightly post is covered and I can have a little free time to do something else. My advice to you when you do contact bloggers is to present yourself well. Be honest and explain what you want to do and what are you are willing to do for them in exchange. Writing content on other blogs is  mutual exchange. You give the blogger a night off from having to write and they give you a medium to spread the word about your own blog or website. 

(from TOONrefugee)

I could see a lot of webmasters getting fairly frustrated with their SEO efforts.  There are plenty of articles that tell you how to generate linkbait.  These posts recommend such tactics as:

1. Provide long, comprehensive lists of information.
2. Title your articles with numbers: 160 resources for X.  The more resources you have, the better.

I’ll stop there, as you’ve probably read articles like this and tried to implement these tactics in the past.  There are plenty of website owners out there who do everything they’re supposed to do and don’t see a return on all their hard work creating comprehensive, informative posts.  It’s just a very crowded internet out there and it’s tough to make a dent, especially considering that there are hundreds of other people in your niche all trying to write resource-based linkbait.
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It’s amazing how many people do not know the principles of blog commenting.  The concept of dofollow may be a fairly new concept – especially to those outside the SEO community – but if you don’t pay attention to this very important attribute, your blog commenting strategy will be for naught.  It depends somewhat if you’re after traffic or better page rank, but my guess is that a lot of people are commenting for the page rank exposure, rather than the traffic (which can be slight).  What other explanation can there be for the litany of people posting comments with stellar anchor text on a PR 0 blog that has nofollow for comment links?  Obviously, these aspiring marketers have no idea that their links count for nothing.

So every blog commenter should devise a good strategy for commenting on blogs in order to get the most page rank value.  Here are the main commenting tips:

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In the past article marketing was a quick fix SEO tool: write one article, syndicate it using submission software or a paid service and your article – along with its backlinks to your site – could go out to thousands of directories and sites. The result: hundreds of instant backlinks, as Google didn’t penalize article directories in the same manner as other types of websites. Two blogs or standard websites with the same posts will be penalized for duplicate content – with the one that actually originated the content possibly being penalized. Article directories, on the other hand, were not penalized for duplicate content in this manner.

The reason was that articles are different than other types of content. The same AP story can show up thousands of different places, and each one of these outlets shouldn’t be penalized for posting something from a wire service. But article directories aren’t an AP service. Someone writing a poorly written article about “How to pet a cat” is not quite of the same caliber as legitimate news. OK, I’m being harsh, there’s actual useful content within article directories. But Google has gotten wise to people gaming the system by over-submitting to article directories just to get backlinks.

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